Category Archives: Review

Though he’s made a dozen records in the past 17 years, Bill Callahan’s name isn’t exactly widely known. Under the guise of Smog (perhaps not to be confused with the football coach of the same name), he’s created a stunning breadth of music that began as skeletal folk and has blossomed into nuanced pop still informed by those initial sketchings. So perhaps that’s why he’s decided to go with his birth name for his thirteenth and latest full-length, Woke on a Whaleheart (Drag City). Like past gems such as Red Apple Falls and Dongs of Sevotion, Whaleheart shows Callahan’s gift for language and ear for song. Leadoff cut “From the Rivers to the Ocean” builds from a fragile piano line into a powerful paean to transcendental love and understanding. “Footprints,” takes a similar lyrical bent, but matches such musing to a propulsive tempo and Elizabeth Warren’s fiery fiddling. Elsewhere “Sycamore” puts amorphisms like “There’s sap in the trees if you tap them. There’s blood on the seas if you map them.” to a sparkling guitar melody that calls on Phil Spector as well as Pete Seeger. Like all his records, Whaleheart reveals an artist that’s become one with his work, music that’s become as much a part of his being as his being is part of his music.

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Patti Smith‘s newest disc, Twelve, is a covers album. Anyone that’s heard Smith’s earlier readings of other folks’ work would probably be understandably excited about a disc full of reinterpretations since this is the woman that absolutely shredded Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” They should probably cool their jets a little, though.
Twelve is an interesting album, and at times an enjoyable listen, but for the most part it’s a failed experiment and a misstep in the same vein as Grant-Lee Phillips’ recent disc of tepidly read ’80s covers. Smith covers a group of songs and, for the most part, merely covers them. In fact the most surprising thing about the whole affair was my own discovery that she actually has a pretty sweet voice when she feels like employing it in the service of a mainstream melody.
In my opinion, this disc is probably just something she tossed off for fun, and her record company probably pounced on it in hopes of milking some sort of financial return out of her recent induction to the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. Fair enough, since it’s only a disappointing listen if you’re looking for Smith to inject her passion into the tunes. For many it will be enough to hear a legend sing along to some older “standards.” I expect Starbucks should probably sell out of its alloted copies in under a week.
Her cover of the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen” does a particularly nice job of proving my point. Smith delivers a solid performance with some wonderfully nuanced vocals, but in the end it doesn’t move me as much as it makes me want to absentmindedly tap my foot along to a familiar oldie. She’s on the road quite a bit between now and her Chicago Lollapalooza stop, though, so maybe the songbook will have collected a few embers and burst into fire by the time she gets here.

MP3: Patti Smith “Soul Kitchen”

Photo by Angelo Cricchi

So it finally all makes sense to me; I’ve found an explanation / excuse for the non-stop rotation of Avril Lavigne‘s newest disc, The Best Damn Thing, in the ol’ tankPOD over the past few weeks. The album is the long-lost follow-up to (read: spiritual sibling of) the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack that came out a few years ago. That particular soundtrack was one of those albums that almost nobody heard, but it was met with great appreciation and devotion by the few to whose ears its power-pop-punk found its way.
Lavigne has taken her pop-tart mall-brat persona and kicked it up a notch. The new album is heavy on the addictive rockers and rather light on the treacly ballads that marred her past efforts critically, but can probably be attributed with her phenomenal sales record. So the biggest difference is that she’s produced an album that has nine guilty pleasures for the Stereogum crowd instead of the usual single and a half that made their way on to previous albums.
The other difference is that Lavigne honestly seems to be trying to find her way as a lyricist. While kick-off single “Girlfriend” is a tune filled with as empty a set of platitudes as you’re going to find in the Top 40 today, she does try to stretch on a tune like “Ridiculous.” In that song she captures the early rush of that whole love and attraction thing, commonly enjoyed by most newly mets or, in her case, newly weds, and ends up with a song that mom and dad can relate to just as easily as a twelve-year-old experiencing her first major crush.
And then there are some tunes, like “I Can Do Better,” where Lavigne is content to let her inner ass-kicking bad girl take over and tell some dickhead it’s time to hit the road. For the one or two missteps she makes (there is one particularly lame rhyme about being bummed when some dude doesn’t pick up the check, which sort of picks away at her alpha-female persona) most of her songs rise to the challenge of trying to bridge the gap between junior high and the mortgage paying demographic.
The Best Damn Thing isn’t a guilty pleasure, because you have nothing to feel guilty about as you pump your fist, and leather bound wrist, into the air and sing along.
MP3:

Being touted as a return to the form of past glories like 100 Broken Windows and The Remote Part, Idlewild’s latest, Make Another World (Sanctuary), is indeed built upon the guitar noise fits of fancy that were largely grounded on 2005’s Warnings/Promises. But more than a return, the album takes off from the Scots’ past vitriolic cadence to venture further abroad. “In Competition for the Worst Time,” is probably the best the band has ever sounded on record, injected with a good deal of youthful wallop and Thermals-like mantras. The album’s title track recalls Boy-era U2 (a good thing), while “If It Takes You Home” is two minutes of pure spitfire. Idlewild’s greatest asset has always been finding catharsis for their taciturn themes in walls of rock bliss, turning doubt and unhappiness into almost joyful cascades of sound. So if Warnings/Promises was the sound of Idlewild maturing, then Make Another World is the band realizing that growing older doesn’t mean being quiet.

Listen: MP3s at Hype Machine
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